Grandmothers May Be To Thank For Human Evolution!
There is new research that suggests that it was grandmothers who played a more prominent role in the survival of families and not the alfa male
There’s an anthropologist at the University of Utah who has been studying modern-hunter gathers like the Hadza, the group who likely had lived in the area that is now northern Tanzania for thousands of years.
Groups like the Hadza are about the closest that anthropologists can get to seeing how early humans lived and survived! The Hadza hold the oldest diet remaining on earth…
The scientists took many trips to the area to study how much food the community members of Hadza were bringing home.
According to Prof Hawkes, when tracking the success rates of human men “they almost always failed to get a big animal.” When the average hunter went out, they were only successful 3.4% of the time!
Which means, the assumption that man caught and gathered all the food- is wrong! They study also found that it wasn’t just meat that humans survived on.
The researchers were surprised to discover that the women, both young and old, were providing the majority of calories to their families and group-mates. The women were said to be mostly digging for tubers, a food sources that was deeply buried and hard to get too. The research found that the success of mothers gathering food helped with the growth of children. More surprisingly, grandmothers were said to gather even more than the mothers!
Grandmothers were crucial in this environment to childhood survival.
